


before the stars

by elliebell (Naladot)



Category: Day6 (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen, Introspection, Reflection, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 09:44:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10554206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/elliebell
Summary: A semi-apocalypse roves across Asia in the form of a giant, inexplicable dust cloud (an apocalypse-lite, if you will). Jae gets an apartment in the countryside.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [kpopolymfics2017](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/kpopolymfics2017) collection. 



> This fic was written for K-Pop Olymfics 2017. Olymfics is a challenge in which participants write fics based on prompt sets and compete against other teams of writers, organized by genre. 
> 
> This is Team AU’s fic for the following prompt set:  
>  **Roy Kim – "The Great Dipper"**  
> [lyrics](http://roykimtrans.blogspot.tw/2015/12/2-buk-du-chil-sung-great-dipper.html) | [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iSuSghFi6c) | [supplementary](https://www.flickr.com/photos/simonparec/17357091383) [prompts](http://67.media.tumblr.com/d9245383f93acd5569516f6a5e82f9bd/tumblr_oh8yj2Y0gE1v9m0i0o1_500.jpg)
> 
> The other 2 fics for this prompt can be found in [the collection](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/kpopolymfics2017). Competition winners are chosen by the readers, so please rate this fic using [this survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/11TQcM2LvPnZlT007ZciT--AE9mo-z2d2mSN4UrdmX8A/edit#responses)!

The day he decided—or realized—that everything was thoroughly bullshit, the weather app on his phone forecasted rain in small cloudy icons but the sky was clear anyway, as if to spite him. It was then that Jae slid his shiny iPhone into the pocket of his artfully worn jeans, stood up from the table at the bar where his friends were laughing in orange lamplight as they instagrammed their drinks, and announced, “I have to go now.” He remembers that Sungjin’s jaw went a little slack and Brian’s eyes narrowed like he was expecting something else to come after the announcement, but Jae just walked out of the bar, dimly aware of his flair for the dramatic but otherwise determined to just—he didn’t know. _Leave_.

 

It was then that the evening drizzle started, misty and unimpressive, catching on his glasses. It was all bullshit, from the top right on down—all of them sitting in this sprawling city, grasping desperately at the phantom of significance, wanting—just _wanting_ , something or anything—and it all added up to what? A thinly knitted red string of imagined destiny. The rain grew heavier. The red string unravelled in his hands.

 

 

 

He rented a new apartment outside the city, in a place where the rent was low and nothing was cool, including his neighbors, who kept a duck in a cage outside their garage and burned incense so strong the smell wafted through the air vents. It was his economic privilege that enabled his mobility—he tried reading Marx one night, more out of boredom than real academic inquiry or social upheaval tendencies; Jae was smart but he gave up staring at the webpage with its 1998 lurid fonts after a solid ten minutes and called it a good effort—but Jae wasn’t ungrateful for the privilege given him by his parents’ hard work and sacrifices, and he hardly thought he was going to find any enlightenment in the countryside. At least he could start making substantial payments on his student loans. (His friends back home posted articles about student loans and broken America. Jae read none of them, because they held no answers).

 

 

 

Most nights he turned on the news, watching an ancient flickering television set he’d bought off his upstairs neighbors before they left the country. It was funny, in the internet age, that the spindly antenna on top of the television could still pick up regular programming, but as his next-door neighbors proved, there were still plenty of people in the world with no sense of the internet beyond the knowledge of its existence—even in this country, where nearly everyone could have internet access, if they wanted.

 

Most nights the news covered the dust cloud roaming across China. The Cyclone, it had been named by English-language media. Every night a news anchor counted off the cities now enveloped in swirling darkness, like brave foot soldiers lost to an impossible war.

 

No one could say for certain where The Cyclone began, in part because no one had believed it was real until it affected them. Jae still had a hard time convincing his parents, back in California, that he might never be able to come back home. Jae first remembered when the Cyclone took Urumqi, because even the PRC couldn’t hide one of its major cities getting swept up in a sandstorm that shouldn’t exist. Then it was Xi’An and tonight it was Beijing, and now the whole world was watching, waiting for the wind to change and for Seoul to be buried in a whirlwind of dust.

 

 

 

After the earthquake that hit Los Angeles, Jae had really thought his students loans would be forgiven. Or lessened, or something. The earthquake came after the hurricanes and the forest fires ravaging the rest of the States, so he thought it would be the final event to tip the scales back in the favor of those who’d suffered for higher education. But he was still in debt, and somehow he thought he’d still have to pay up even after the whole of Asia turned into Tatooine. So the apartment on the outskirts of Seoul was a good investment, really, if he wanted to be any kind of upstanding citizen in the next era of humanity.

 

Maybe Jae was a good citizen out of habit more than anything. Maybe that was the same reason he was kind of a crappy friend and an inadequate musician. You get in your groove. You can’t really figure out how to get out.

 

 

 

Brian visited him first, also probably out of habit more than anything. Brian had a habit of taking care of Jae and Jae had a habit of making fun of Brian, which would make their relationship symbiotic, or at the very least, Jae the barnacle to Brian’s humpback whale.

 

(How were the humpback whales faring, these days? Were they laughing at the idiot humans walking the continents, or were they suffering along with the rest of them?)

 

“It’s—nice,” Brian said vaguely when he walked in the door, hitting his head on a bare lightbulb hanging down from its electrical cord. Jae had taped a sign on it, “DUCK,” but Brian apparently couldn’t read. 

 

“Dude, no it’s not,” Jae laughed, and sank down onto one of half a dozen plastic stools his downstairs neighbors had given him before they fled to Taiwan. “But it’s cheap.”

 

Brian looked at him with that weird, intense but vacant look he got sometimes. Jae wanted to a thousand questions roaming through his head, like _hey have you figured out how you’re going to spend your apocalypse-lite?_ But he didn’t.

 

“I worry about you, out here all alone,” Brian finally said. And Jae didn’t know what to say.

 

 

 

He wasn’t really alone, though. The apartment below him and to the left housed an old lady whose children had moved to the UK a decade ago and apparently forgotten their filial duties—or, they paid for the apartment but the woman was lonely, anyway, which was probably the most important thing.

 

She was crabby and she owned three cats and she banged on her ceiling with a broom if Jae played the guitar after 9 PM, but when he suggested turning the empty apartment next to her into a greenhouse to feed them when they couldn’t go outdoors anymore, her eyes lit up like he’d just suggested taking her to Disneyland.

 

So Jae went out and bought special plant-growing lights and every kind of seed he could find and huge bags of dirt and a book on gardening written in Korean too complicated for him to understand, and stood in long lines with a hundred other Cyclone-inspired amateur farmers. Then he came back and the old lady fixed him a bowl of beef stew and lectured him for being too skinny, extolling the virtues of exercise, apparently forgetting that soon enough, none of them would be able to go outdoors.

 

Maybe that’s what inspired Jae to get up the next morning and go for a run. He’d never liked running, but the brilliant blue sky and bracing crisp air flamed life into his lungs. His feet pounded the pavement as if it was his last day on earth.

 

 

 

The old lady’s three cats took to following him around the empty apartment as he set up the soil beds and pondered the feasibility of keeping two people and three cats alive in the era of The Cyclone. He named the cats Stepsister 1, Stepsister 2, and Captain Underpants. The two stepsisters were long-haired, blue-eyed, and vain, and they liked to perch on the kitchen cupboards and stare at Jae with great disdain as he cleaned and planted seeds, which made him feel like Cinderella. The boy cat had a flat, grumpy face and scraggly fur and was extremely stupid. He looked like the principal from the _Captain Underpants_ books but he acted like an idiot, hence the name. He was quickly becoming Jae’s best friend, even when he ate all the petals off the rosebush Jae had bought for the old lady. And threw them back up on Jae’s bed.

 

“Me too, buddy,” Jae said as he stripped off the sheets with a sigh. “Me too.”

 

Captain Underpants blinked, and then started licking his paws. Dumb cat.

 

 

 

Wonpil was the first to move in, either because he was lonely or desperate, probably both. He showed up at Jae’s door with a duffel bag and a long story about a fight with Jinyoung and strangers sleeping in his bed, which Jae mostly tuned out until he reached the point where he could say, “Do you know how many times I found _you_ sleeping in _my_ bed?”

 

“That’s different,” Wonpil sniffed. 

 

“I have a real cat now,” Jae told him. “I don’t need you anymore.” Wonpil appraised Captain Underpants on the counter, in the middle of an obscene cat bath.

 

“A real winner,” Wonpil agreed. And then he followed Jae up and down the stairs and out on his run and all the way to the old neighborhood playground, like he was a lost child.

 

They sat on the swings for a long time in silence, squinting in the bright sunlight.

 

“Is it just me,” Wonpil said, “Or is the sunlight brighter now that it’s about to go away?”

 

“Like Nancy, before she dumped me,” Jae mused.

 

“Sounds like a song to me,” Wonpil said. They sat there for a while longer, quiet, not sure where to go from here.

 

 

 

The old lady approved of Wonpil because everyone approved of Wonpil the moment he flashed his glittering smile their way. She gave him extra helpings of dinner (“He’s even skinnier than you.” “But I’m _taller!_ ” “Tough luck.”) and pinched his cheeks every time he asked for more. Then the three of them went and sat in the garden apartment, watching the dirt under the bright lights, the television playing on mute in the corner. An “expert” was talking about The Cyclone, as though anyone could be an expert on something that had never happened before.

 

“Let’s play something,” Wonpil implored. 

 

Jae couldn’t say no, so he got his guitar and Wonpil pulled out a ukulele. 

 

“I couldn’t bring the piano,” he explained.

 

So they played a little bit of everything—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Do Re Mi,” some Coldplay and Britney Spears, “Row Row Row Your Boat,” and a song Jae had written a long time ago when they still had the band together, about how you never know what you’ve gone through until you can turn around and take a good hard look at the stream of your life as it pushed you into the future. The song was in English but the old lady was crying at the end of it. She patted Jae on the arm, and left the room.

 

 

 

Dowoon turned up the next day, either out of dog-like intuition or because Wonpil had called him.

 

“Are you guys growing weed?” he asked, walking into the garden room.

 

“It’s _food_ , idiot,” Jae said, and gave him a garden spade.

 

“It doesn’t look like anything,” Dowoon retorted. But he followed Jae’s instructions and started in on a trough at the far end of the living room. Jae looked at him and Wonpil, and Captain Underpants watching in approval, and he looked out the window, where fluffy white clouds ambled across the deep blue sky, as unconcerned and soft as if they had all the time in the world.

 

 

 

News reports stopped with analyses and turned to precautionary information. Where to register your household. How the Cyclone would affect city water, sewage, electricity, law enforcement. How to seal up your house to protect it from the storm, how to detect CO2 poisoning, how to grow your own food. What to do if you became isolated.

 

Sungjin showed up next, with his mom and dad in tow. “I didn’t know where else to go,” he explained, his eyes wide and red but determined. “They won’t let anyone else into Seoul now that it’s coming, and they couldn’t stay in their home—”

 

“We’ve got room,” Jae said.

 

 

 

Brian was the last to move into the apartment complex, and Jae couldn’t tell whether it was because he was being obstinate or because he was not actually worried—with Brian, it could be either and might well be both. He arrived in a van with his, Wonpil’s, and Dowoon’s families all squished in with as many belongings and as much food as they could bring. It occurred to Jae that he was the only one who was alone, that is except the old lady and the cats.

 

“You’re all we’ve got,” Brian said when Jae voiced this fear. Jae’s cellphone lit up constantly with messages from his parents, trying to get him on a flight out of the country when there were none, and messages from his sister, trying to strategize with him on how to calm down their parents. “I know we’re not family, but,”

 

“You might as well be,” Jae finished.

 

Before the moment could get any more mushy, Dowoon threw a drumstick at Jae’s head.

 

 

 

After that, the apartment building started feeling more like home than anywhere Jae had lived in a long time. He’d given up social media when he moved here, mostly to be ornery but partially because he loved it too much and he was pretty sure all the things he loved needed to go. Maybe it was the right call, because now he had nothing cool to speak of in his life, but there were a dozen people helping him seal up the windows and put special filters on the ventilation system, and Dowoon’s nephews were chasing Captain Underpants up and down the stairs. Sungjin’s parents built a chicken coop in the empty apartment next to the old lady’s, and Brian’s parents bought enough fresh water to last them at least six months. Whether the storm would have blown over by then, no one knew. It was the kind of question no one was asking. There weren’t any answers.

 

 

 

_The Cyclone is expected to hit Korea within the next two days, following the path predicted by meteorologists last week—_

 

Jae couldn’t watch the news anymore. He stood at the back of the large living room where everyone had gathered, an eerie silence draped around them as the night set in. Quietly he faded from the room and climbed the stairs up to the roof, two at a time, taking deep gulps of fresh air as he went. There was a scent hanging in the air, something dark and strange, but the sky was clear for miles. Out here in the countryside the stars burned bright and fierce, winking down at him, unrelenting.

 

The anger that caused him to move here weeks ago had dissipated with the oncoming storm. Jae pulled off his glasses and rubbed at them with the hem of his T-shirt, wondering what had changed. Surely everything was more bullshitty now than it had been then, but he felt calm in the face of a miniature apocalypse. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was some kind of animal instinct, going into shock so that he could survive. Maybe there was something sacred in the process of rebirth, of what they’d built here while they prepared for the worst.

 

But that night, the air was clear and he couldn’t imagine getting swallowed up in a storm of dust. He lay on the roof and stretched his arms and legs out to either side, watching the way the stars arranged themselves in the sky. The Great Dipper poured itself out into the night, as if to promise that for an eternity the world had spun forward, and it would spin forward now, on and on into the unimaginable future, and somehow Jae would be right here, breathing deeply, alive beneath the stars.


End file.
